When tech giant Facebook was getting popular over a decade ago, the online virtual farming game FarmVille kept internet users across the world hooked to the social networking platform. The game allowed users own a piece of virtual land and cultivate crops. Millions of Facebook users logged on to the platform to sow seeds and water their crops daily.

The game was so popular that its developer, Zynga, contributed to 12 per cent of Facebook’s overall revenue in 2011. During FarmVille’s two-year reign, the social media giant’s userbase grew from 200 million in April 2009 to 750 million in July 2011. However, FarmVille remained just another game in the market.

Come 2019, the trend has caught up to places like Bengaluru, Coimbatore, Hyderabad and Surat, except this time the farming is for real.

Every alternative weekend, Chandra Prakash Agarwal, a chartered accountant working in Bengaluru, travels to the outskirts of the city to harvest and collect vegetables from the 600-sq ft farmland that he has rented from a farmer in Janthagondahalli.